Overexposed

by Michael Blair

  OVEREXPOSED

  OVEREXPOSED

  A Granville Island Mystery

  Michael Blair

  A Castle Street Mystery

  Copyright © Michael Blair, 2006

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  Editor: Barry Jowett

  Copy-editor: Jennifer Gallant

  Design: Jennifer Scott

  Printer: Webcom

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Blair, Michael, 1946-

  Overexposed : a Granville Island mystery / Michael Blair.

  ISBN-10: 1-55002-582-1

  ISBN-13: 978-1-55002-582-8

  I. Title.

  PS8553.L3354O98 2006 C813’.6 C2005-904874-3

  1 2 3 4 5 10 09 08 07 06

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Printed on recycled paper

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  for Pamela

  Author’s Note

  Many of the locations in this book — Granville Island, Sea Village, Bridges Pub, Harbour Ferries Marina, the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club — are real, although not necessarily exactly as portrayed. All events and characters, however, are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events or people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  chapter one

  I found the dead man on a bright Sunday morning in September, the week after Labour Day. He was slumped in a plastic lawn chair on the roof deck of my house, chin on his chest, fingers linked in his lap, ankles comfortably crossed, looking for all the world as though he had just dozed off. I didn’t know he was dead, of course, when I found him, although I suppose he knew. The first thing that occurred to me, standing there in my socks, hung over from the previous night’s celebration of the close of the fourth decade of my life, was that some local homeless person, of which there are a few in Vancouver, even on Granville Island, had somehow managed to get onto the roof deck and had fallen asleep there. On closer examination, however, I realized that he was too well dressed to be homeless, in a blue blazer, yellow polo shirt, grey trousers, and polished black loafers. A friend, then, I thought, left over from the night before, too drunk to drive home — some of my friends are that sensible. I didn’t recognize him, though. A friend of a friend, perhaps.

  I wasn’t in the best of shape myself. The slightest exertion caused me to break into an icy sweat. My mouth seemed to be lined with ferret fur, my head felt as though someone had jabbed sharpened sticks behind my eyeballs, and the coffee, which I’d made far too strong, was making me twitchy and nauseous.

  “Hello?” I said to the man in the chair. My voice, roughened from too much drink and talk the night before, was gravelly and unfamiliar in my own ears.

  He didn’t answer, of course. I stepped closer. He was in his late fifties or early sixties, I guessed, with a full head of iron grey hair, which appeared to have been recently cut. He was clean-shaven, and his complexion was fine and pale, but with a slightly waxy appearance.

  “Hello,” I said again, louder. I grasped his shoulder, shook him gently. “Hey, wake up. Go home. The party’s over.”

  Unsurprising in retrospect, he felt stiff and unresponsive, curiously cool to the touch, even through the material of his jacket, a condition I attributed at the time to spending the night under the stars. I shook him a little harder, whereupon he toppled out of the chair, landing on the deck with an ugly thud. Startled, I jumped back, spilling coffee on myself and almost tripping over a potted plant. The man lay stiffly on his side, in more or less a sitting position, as though he were made of plaster. Slowly, though, his arms and legs settled into a more comfortable-looking attitude.

  He wasn’t dead drunk, I realized then. He was just dead.

  I stumbled downstairs — or below, if you insist; I live in a floating home. Kevin Ferguson, my friend and former boss, was sprawled on the sofa in the living room. Kevin may have looked like death warmed over, but he wasn’t dead. Dead men don’t make the kind of noise he was making. I shook him awake. He snorted and snuffled and sat up with a startled jerk that made my head hurt.

  “What? What is it?” he said, looking around with a panicky expression on his horsy, freckled face.

  “There’s a dead man on the roof,” I said.

  “Eh? What?”

  “There’s a dead man on the roof,” I said again.

  “So why tell me, for crissake?” he growled. “Call 911.” He flopped back down onto the sofa.

  I went into the kitchen to use the phone. There were empty wine, beer, and liquor bottles everywhere, and glasses and dirty dishes and every piece of cutlery I owned piled in the sink and stacked in the dishwasher. A pair of green plastic garbage bags overflowed with pizza boxes, paper plates, and Chinese takeout containers. A fat fly buzzed around the remnants of a Costco chocolate cake on the kitchen table. Ignoring the mess, I took the phone off the wall, focused as best I could, and managed to dial 911 on the very first try.

  “Fiepolisamblans,” a female voice said.

  “Uh? What?”

  “Fire-police-ambulance,” she said again. “What is the nature of your emergency?”

  “Um, well, there’s a dead man on my roof.”

  “On your roof? What do you mean, on your roof?”

  “My roof deck,” I amended. “I live in a floating home in False Creek.”

  “I see. Name and address please.”

  “My name is Tom McCall,” I said. “I live in number six Sea Village, Granville Island.”

  “Are you certain the man’s dead?”

  “Pretty certain. I mean, he isn’t breathing that I can tell.”

  “Did you attempt CPR?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Is he injured?”

  “He doesn’t appear to be.”

  “No sign of external trauma?”

  “None that I can see.”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “No. Look, I’m enjoying playing twenty questions with you, but don’t you think you should send the police or something?”

  “The police and paramedics are on their way, sir,” the operator said.

  “I think it’s too late for paramedics,” I said.

  The paramedics came anyway, waking Kevin again as they lugged their equipment through the house and up the stairs to the second floor and thence the roof deck, where they examined the man lying there and pronounced him dead.

  “I could’ve told them that,” I said. “I think I did.”
/>   “Don’t be a smartass, Tom,” Constable Mabel Firth said. “A man’s dead. Show some respect.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You look like hell, by the way.”

  “Thank you.”

  Mabel Firth was a big, strapping blond in her early forties. She worked out of the Community Policing office on Granville Island. I’d made her acquaintance professionally a couple of years before and we’d become friends. She and her husband, Bill, had been at the party, but they’d left early. Bill Firth worked for the city, too, in some capacity involving water treatment. At what stage, I wasn’t sure.

  Mabel’s hulking younger partner, whose name tag read “B. Tucker” and whom she called “Baz,” finished searching the dead man’s pockets. Better him than me, I thought. “Nothing,” Baz said.

  “And you’ve no idea who he is?” Mabel asked me again.

  “Not a clue,” I said.

  “You don’t remember seeing him at the party last night,” she said.

  “No.”

  There was no external access to the roof deck. Beyond scaling the outside wall, landing by parachute, leaping out of a hovering helicopter, or direct descent from the heavens, the only way to get to the roof was through the house. He must have arrived with one of the guests. Or maybe he’d just arrived. Who’d have noticed a stranger in the house? Not me for sure, in the state I’d been in.

  Mabel looked at Kevin Ferguson.

  He shook his head and winced. “Me either,” he said. “Someone must’ve seen him,” Mabel said. “I’ll start with the people I know, but we’ll need a guest list.”

  “No problem,” I said. “And there were a couple of single-use cameras lying around for people to use. First thing tomorrow, I’ll get the film developed.”

  One of the paramedics came over. “No sign of foul play,” he said. “Looks like cardiac arrest or a stroke.”

  “Thanks,” Mabel Firth replied. “We’ll let the coroner make that call, I think.”

  The paramedic shrugged and he and his partner collected their gear and left. Shortly thereafter a team from the coroner’s office arrived. A squat, balding man in his fifties performed a hands-off in situ examination, dictating in a hushed, self-conscious voice into a tiny tape recorder. Another man took flash pictures with a nice little Nikon digital I would have asked him about had the circumstances been different. All the while a pair of burly attendants stood quietly by with a body bag and a gurney. Although they all had undoubtedly performed this ritual many times, it was done with solemn efficiency and respect. For both the living and the dead.

  It was almost noon before the body was removed and the police and the coroner’s people left. Kevin Ferguson was the last to leave.

  “You gonna be okay, Flash?” he asked. Flash was the nickname Kevin had given me when I’d worked as a photographer for the Sun, where he was managing editor. I’d left eight years before, though, to start my own commercial photography business.

  “Yeah, I’ll be fine. Do me a favour, though, will you? Try to keep it out of the paper, my name at least.” I didn’t want to provide my ex-wife with any more ammunition than necessary to seek full custody of our daughter; I saw little enough of her as it was.

  “Sure,” Kevin said. “Shouldn’t be a problem. Not much news in a guy dying of a heart attack, even at one of your parties. I can’t speak for my esteemed colleagues, though; Sundays are SNDs — slow news days. But maybe you could use the publicity.” With a stab of embarrassment I recalled whining to him sometime last night about how bad business had been lately.

  Kevin left. After checking the living room again, the spare bedroom, and the sofa in my home office, and finding no more bodies, dead or alive, I chased a couple more extra-strength Tylenol with a glass of ENO, swished a capful of mouthwash through my teeth, and crawled into bed. I slept, but fitfully. At some point I dreamed that my house had broken loose from its mooring and drifted out to sea, with only me and the dead man aboard. He complained that he wasn’t dressed for a sea voyage. In the dream I knew his name, but I couldn’t remember it, of course, when I woke up at a little past three in the afternoon. I got out of bed, feeling somewhat better, albeit still a bit shaky and with a dull, throbbing ache behind my eyeballs. I took more Tylenol, showered, decided it was too much trouble, possibly even risky, to shave, and went downstairs to the kitchen. One look at the mess, though, and I almost went back to bed.

  I half-heartedly restacked the glasses, dishes, and cutlery in the dishwasher, added detergent, and got it started. I made some more coffee, not quite so strong this time. While the coffee dripped, I ate a quarter cantaloupe with cottage cheese and whole wheat toast and drank a half-litre of orange juice. When I opened the dishwasher and began removing the clean dishes, I found a black lace brassiere and a pair of matching panties. The cups of the bra seemed rather large in comparison to the chest circumference, and the panties contained hardly enough material to fill a shot glass. I looked forward to meeting the owner, if she ever came to retrieve them. They’d be clean, at least.

  The phone rang at five. I was keeping Kevin’s place on the sofa warm. I groped my way into the kitchen and answered without looking at the call display.

  “Happy birthday, Daddy.” It was my daughter, Hilly, calling from Toronto.

  “Hiya, Scout. Thanks.”

  “Did you get my card?”

  “Yes, I did. It was very funny. But forty isn’t that old.”

  “It is when you’re fourteen,” she replied.

  “Haw,” I said. There was a high-pitched squeal from the phone. “Ouch.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’ve got new hearing aids.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. Hilly had worn hearing aids since she was four, tiny things that fit into her ear canals and were almost but not quite invisible. She kept outgrowing them.

  “Do you have a cold?” she asked.

  “Uh, no.”

  We chatted for a few minutes, catching up. Hilly usually spent the summer with me, but this year she’d spent only three weeks in July. She was getting older and there were more interesting things to do than hang around with her dad. She asked me to give her regards to Bobbi Brooks, my business partner, to Daniel Wu and Maggie Urquhart, my Sea Village neighbours, and to Harvey, Maggie’s huge Harlequin Great Dane. She then spoke those most dreaded of words: “Mom wants to speak to you.”

  “Uh, what about?”

  “She’ll tell you,” Hilly replied ominously. “Bye.”

  There was a click, then Linda, my former spouse, came on the line.

  “Hello, Tom. How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” I replied. Had Linda always sounded so much like my mother? I wondered.

  “Are you getting a cold?” she asked.

  “I guess,” I said. “What is it you want to talk to me about?”

  “Hillary?” Linda said. “Are you still on the line?” There was no answer; Hilly was smarter than that. “If you are,” Linda said, “hang up right now.”

  “What’s this all about?” I asked.

  “As you may know,” Linda said, “Jack’s mother and stepfather live in Australia.” Jack was Jack Flynn, Linda’s current husband, Hilly’s stepfather. Not a bad guy, as husbands of former spouses go, except that he got to see a whole lot more of my daughter than I did. He was good to Hilly, though, and she liked him, although she frequently referred to him as the “Fat Food King of Southern Ontario.” He owned a dozen or so fast food franchises in and around Toronto. Bags of money.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know.”

  “Jack’s stepfather is terminally ill.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Linda said. “Naturally, Jack wants to go to Australia to be with his mother.”

  “Naturally,” I said. Then it dawned on me. “And he wants you and Hilly to go with him, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you expect me to object?”

  “No,” she said, a little to
o emphatically, I thought. “Well, maybe, a little.”

  “A few months in Australia would be a great experience.”

  “I think so too,” Linda said. Hesitantly, she added, “But we could be gone for up to a year. After his step-father, um, passes, he wants his mother to come and live with us.”

  “I would miss Hilly,” I said. “But a year isn’t such a long time. Besides, like I said, it would be a great experience.”

  “That’s very understanding of you, Tom,” Linda said, as if bestowing upon me an award for behaviour above and beyond her expectations. She paused, then said, “But that isn’t the problem.”

  “What is, then?”

  “She doesn’t want to go. She wants to stay with you while we’re away.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh, indeed. I want you to talk to her, Tom. Tell her what you told me, that a year in Australia would be a good experience for her.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “You want me to tell my daughter that I think she should go to Australia with you and her stepfather and watch her step-grandfather die rather than spend the year with me?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way, exactly.”

  “What way would you put it? Exactly.”

  “You don’t really want her to go, do you?”

  “I didn’t say that. I actually really do think she could learn a lot from it. How to play the didgeridoo, for instance. Or to like Vegemite.”

  “Oh, for god’s sake, Tom,” Linda said with a heavy and martyred sigh. “Why must everything be a big joke to you?”

  “Put Hilly on,” I said.

  Silence, punctuated by the hollow hum of the long-distance connection, followed by a wary, “What are you going to tell her?”

  “Listen in, if you like,” I said.

  Linda gave another long-suffering sigh, then called to Hilly, “Hillary, your father would like to speak with you.”

  A few seconds later, Hilly said, “Daddy?”

  “Scout, about this Australia thing — ”

  “Mom?” Hilly said, interrupting. “Hang up the phone.” She waited, then said to me, “Do you think she’s listening in?”